KinoSol, Iowa entrepreneurs featured in online TV show

The makers of “Ambitious Adventures,” an online television show on the Entrepreneur Network, brought their production to Iowa to illustrate what makes certain business ideas a success and to feature some of the entrepreneurial talent within Iowa’s Cultivation Corridor. Ames-based KinoSol, a member of the CYstarters program’s inaugural cohort, was one of the companies featured on the show which first aired on Nov. 13.

Entrepreneur Network partner Greg Rollett said one of the keys to growing a startup business is building a team — bringing people on to help the business fulfill its mission and dream. “True growth as an entrepreneur is to build a team around you,” Rollett said.

KinoSol is an example of a successful company that has done just that. As Iowa State University Global Development students at the time, a business plan competition at Iowa State gave KinoSol founding members Clayton Mooney, Elise Kendall, Ella Gehrke and Mikayla Sullivan, an opportunity to pool their resources to work on a project to address world poverty. Their first prototype, “KinoSol 1.0,” an all-natural conduction-system food dehydrator, was built as a means to address food insecurity issues that affect people all over the world. From that initial project, KinoSol went on to form a company and expand their product design to their first commercial product, the Orenda, a solar-powered food dehydrator with a storage component, designed to help families in developing regions to preserve additional food and nutrients.

“They’re tackling something big, but the fact they have a team, I mean, without their team, they wouldn’t be able to do that,” Entrepreneur Network partner Brandon T. Adams said. “They have somebody who does social media, somebody who pitches for them, somebody who works with a manufacturer — that team is how they’ve become so successful.”